LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

MAURA DOOLEY (b. 1955) is a desperately sensitive poet. What Every Woman Should Carry is a description of a woman’s heart by analysing the content of her purse:

My mother gave me the prayer to Saint Theresa.

I added a used tube ticket, kleenex,

several Polo mints (furry), a tampon, pesetas,

a florin. Not wishing to be presumptuous,

not trusting you either, a pack of 3.

I have a pen. There is space for my guardian

angel, she has to fold her wings. Passport.

A key. Anguish, at what I said/didn't say

when once you needed/didn’t need me. Anadin.

A credit card. His face the last time,

my impatience, my useless youth.

That empty sack, my heart. A box of matches.

She is a discreet love-poet. Her moments of love are sharp and on the dangerous edge of pain:

At the door

the love we want to offer

gathers itself.

Safe Home,

Take Care,                                                                                                                          Good Luck, God Bless,                                                                                                              

a rabbit's foot.

Nothing saves us

from the boat tossed over,

a leaf in storm,

like my heart                                                                                                                     

turning now,                                                                                                           

as darkness takes you,

and somewhere

a door slams,

long, long into the night. (Pathetic Magic)

Her language is abrupt, she hates explaining what can be suggested. This Desperado need to tell stories rather than describe emotions (which would be too dull nowadays), to drown in small narratives – each line can be a story in itself – indicates that poets need a refuge from sensibility into fiction, from personal to impersonal. From confession to other people making a show of themselves. Michael Donaghy and Maura Dooley, though with very different actors, stage the same busy desire to hide behind a busy cardboard world. This is not me, they say ostensibly. This is you. See yourself. Some readers may wonder though, Do we?

Maura Dooley is both factual and emotional, which saves her poems. Flood solves the enigma of her simultaneous personality and impersonality. A line states: ‘Each time we meet there is more to say,/ fewer ways of saying it.’ Desperado poetry experiences a crisis of the word, indeed. This does not happen for the first time. Each new movement starts from a  different crisis of the word. Maura Dooley fights the colourless words, dulled by common speech, and intersperses them with lines made up of sheer intensity:

You look in from the other side

of carriage windows. You disappear in

the crowd at ticket barriers. I see

your cycle leaning in the guard's van.

I need you in the empty seat beside me. (Backwards into Wakefield Westgate)

In their hurry to speak quickly and say everything at once, without confessing anything directly, Desperado poets find new ways for intensity, and Maura Dooley’s own device is combining incidents that happen to everyone but herself with disarmingly personal statements. She fights the general disapproval of autobiography in the poem with lines which describe her naked, with her life and soul on the page.